OpenSUSE Project Transfers Parts of Maintenance to Community

OpenSUSE updates will, in future, be decided by a joint panel of Novell staff and community members. Only security updates will be decided by Novell alone.

That Novell would relinquish a further part of its control over the openSUSE distribution was announced by Christian Dengler on the openSUSE mailing list at the end of October. From openSUSE 11.2 onwards, according to the announcement, the community would have a bigger say as to which updates would be chosen and which not.OpenSUSE users and community members can make update suggestions for a particular component in the new maintenance module. A panel of three community members and two Novell staff members will then jointly decide which upgrades will be included in the update-repo. Such decisions have until now been made by Novell internally and without consultation with the community.

The choice of security updates however, will remain solely with Novell, as this involves a very fast and trusted process. With openSUSE 11.2, Novell has also announced a cut in the release cycle – instead of 24, patches will become available after 18 months.

Just in time for the launch of openSUSE 11.1, Novell developers have completed the new Contrib-Repository. The Contrib will act as a bridge between factory (packages officially supported by Novell) and third party packages.

The recent mail from Novell titled "Upcoming maintenance requirement to access patches and service packs for select Novell products" only adds confusion for Linux customers. As it turns out, nothing much has changed.